In the USA, the story of a woman who recounted her divorce after twenty years of married life has become a true literary sensation in recent months. The book topped The New York Times bestseller list, sparked heated debates in social networks and book clubs, and Netflix has already acquired the rights for its film adaptation. However, along with popularity came criticism. The Wall Street Journal journalist Holly Peterson believes that the discussion surrounding the book is no less interesting than the book itself.
The book in question is "Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage" by American author Belle Burden. In the book, the woman tries to answer the question of how a person with whom you have lived for twenty years can suddenly become a stranger.
The story of the family's disintegration begins with a phone call from a stranger, who informs her of her husband's affair with his wife. A few weeks later, the husband himself admits to infidelity and announces a divorce. Burden describes what followed — legal disputes, the children's experiences, and her own attempt to re-evaluate the entire marriage, looking for signs that the catastrophe had been brewing long before it began.
Belle Burden first told her version of the story in the essay "Was I Married to a Stranger?", published in The New York Times' "Modern Love" column in 2023. Three years later, the book appeared and unexpectedly became a bestseller.
Analyzing the book's success, The Wall Street Journal journalist Holly Peterson notes that for many American women, Belle Burden's story transformed from the drama of one woman into a story experienced by many women.
"Burden gave women across the country the opportunity to collectively experience anger, directing it at a specific object — her ex-husband.
This allows many women to unite around their accumulated experience of being interrupted, ignored, underpaid, and underestimated," writes Peterson.
The author's identity also sparked additional interest. Belle Burden was born into one of America's most privileged families. On her father's side, she is from the Vanderbilt dynasty, whose wealth once made them among the most influential people in the USA. On her mother's side, she is the granddaughter of Babe Paley — a socialite and fashion trendsetter for the American elite in the middle of the last century. Therefore, for many readers, Burden's story shatters the perception that wealth or high social standing can protect a person from humiliation and loss of control over their own life.
At the same time, Peterson admits that she is concerned about how quickly the public passed moral judgment on the characters in this story. In the mass consciousness, she writes, the author's husband transformed into an undisputed villain, and Burden herself became a symbol of all wronged women. However, the reality of divorce processes is always more complex.
The journalist argues that every time the book is discussed, she asks the same question: "What would we hear if we knew the husband's version?" And this question, according to her, elicits a hostile reaction from many. People immediately start listing accusations: he's a scoundrel, he wanted to take away the houses from his wife, he abandoned the children. Women perceive the very attempt to see through the other side's eyes as a betrayal of female solidarity.
The unwillingness to acknowledge nuances affects not only how we perceive the latest literary sensation. Such a method of communication — and sometimes a refusal of communication — has become characteristic of our entire political and public discourse, writes the critic.
According to the critic, Belle Burden is not lying. She simply tells her story as she sees it.
"Memoirs are a subjective agreement between the author and the reader, not sworn testimony in court," Peterson observes, recalling her own divorce as an example.
During family therapy, a consultant showed her and her husband a set of wooden animal figures. She saw an elephant in one of them, while her husband saw a giraffe. This simple experiment showed that they were arguing not about facts, but about different interpretations of the same reality. Two people looked at the same object but saw completely different images.
Peterson argues that, unlike most readers of the book, she is well acquainted with the environment in which Burden lived. She grew up in similar circles of the New York elite and knows people from the author's ex-husband's entourage. Therefore, the journalist claims, some episodes of the book seem true to her, while others do not quite.
Peterson points out that Burden skillfully structured the memoir as a kind of financial thriller, where the reader is supposed to worry about a woman who might lose everything after divorce. But this is not true.
The journalist reminds us that a few months after the book's release, The New Yorker published an article about Burden's financial situation. The article reported that the author is a beneficiary of a $63 million family trust, of which about $45 million was to go to her and her brother after their stepmother's death.
Therefore, Peterson asks: why then do many women so easily believe that Burden was on the verge of financial catastrophe? Why was mere resentment not enough, and a story was also needed about her being left without a penny to her name?
In her opinion, the public's reaction might be related not so much to the story of a specific marriage, but rather to a broader sense of female powerlessness.
Peterson points out that in reality, after the divorce, Burden received a favorable property settlement, owns two homes, and receives significant child support payments. Her ex-husband lives a few blocks away and continues to see the children, though not as often as the author would like.
Peterson warns women readers: one should not automatically and uncritically defend every woman who claims to have experienced injustice. The world is not black and white, and there are different situations in life.
She urges to remember that in the modern world, women have become "the main architects of family and social order" and possess "enormous, sometimes even frightening control over who our children grow up to be and how our partners behave."
"As a nation, we need to relearn how to respect an opposing view on the same problem, recognize how strange, unbalanced, and dogmatic we have become, and muster the courage to openly disagree with each other. If we can at least accept this, we will stop being such 'strangers' to one another," Peterson concludes.
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